Yes, it was oil, and if you really think about driving forces, you have to concede that Western capitalism was the main driver of the wars, the breakup of old countries and the fracturing of the middle east. Western capital used what some have called "primative accumulation" as their primary method of extracting natural resources from other people's territories. Translated that means "steal by force". I predict that things will continue to deteriorate in the world until large numbers of people in the West denounce primative accumulation and the wars that enable it, and demand a turn away from war as the principle means of international dispute resolution.
And Israel has never declared official borders. Also it has since 1948 been in an official "state of emergency" Can there be any better evidence that expansion was/is planned?
I'll go a little further back with my 1895 Rand McNally World Atlas. One year later, 1896, Theodore Herzl attempted to buy all of Palestine from the Ottoman Sultan, who refused saying he could not betray his people. Take a look at this map (link follows) of 1895 Palestine noting that the overall map is labeled, curiously, "Turkey in Asia", not the Ottoman Empire in Asia.
Then there is a closeup of Palestine (link below). Note that not just the city but the entire region is labeled "Jerusalem" and to the north of it (not shown) everything right up through what is now Lebanon is labeled in the atlas "Beirut". You can see on the map north of the city of Jerusalem an area called Judea, in keeping with the Zionist labels of "Samaria and Judea" taken from ancient times.
Almost all place names are in Arabic, most of which Zionism has erased and replaced with either ancient names or new names for settlements that are of course not on this map. That Zionism wants to erase the natives as well is evident in Gaza at the moment, but has been a work in progress all along in the West Bank.
Israeli PM Ariel Sharon saw that Gaza was too heavily populated for a few tiny Israeli settlements to make progress so he withdrew them, leaving Gaza as a seemingly impossible nut to crack. Now we see the the nut being cracked and from the comments of Israeli government officials including Netanyahu this is causing a great deal of excitement for Israelis.
The U.S. was very instrumental in the creation and establishment of the nation of Israel after World War II. It provided ~ and still provides ~ a forward base and basis for military and intelligence operations in the oil-richest region of the Planet; something the US had been wanting to do since at least the end of World War I.
And one thing is certain about the 2115 globe: the United States will not be on it. In fact, there is a very real probability that the United States will not be on a globe made in 2028.
At this stage of the game, i do not think that the United States will survive to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, 912 days from today. And if it does, i think the American Peoples will be in no condition or mood to celebrate anything.
Those who would dismiss as implausible and impossible the demise of the United States in less than three years are invited to consider the year 1988, and how things were going back then at the Berlin Wall, around the Warsaw Bloc, and in the USSR itself. And then remember how things had changed there three years later, starting with the fall of that Wall in 1989 and ultimately, the disintegration of the USSR and the demise of European Communism by the end of 1991.
And those who would denounce this prediction as either irreverent, irrelevant, absurd, conspiratorial, and/or unpatriotic ~ if not traitorous, treasonous, and seditious [there seems to be quite a lot of that going around these days] ~ are invited to confront the simple, obvious [albeit painful] reality that the United States of America is today, has been for a long, long time, and shows no indication of stopping being:
l. a Bankrupt Debtor State
2. an Imperialist Warfare State
3. a Redistributionist Welfare State
4. a Secrecy/Surveillance/Security/proto-Police State
5. an Autocratic/Oligarchic/Plutocratic/Patriarchal Deep State
6. a Failing or at best Flailing Nation State
7. an Overshoot State
And, perhaps most importantly,
8. a People and Nation no longer merely "divided," but fractured~ even to the point of disintegration~ in ways not seen in more than 164 years, since the eve of what may end up being merely the FIRST American Civil War.
The Brits did a little switcheroo during WWI. First they promised Palestine to the Arabs to get their help defeating the Turks. Then they promised Palestine to the Jews to get their help convincing Wilson to get the US into the war. Then after the war they kept Palestine for themselves. High level diplomacy, that.
I have a slightly different perspective on the conflicting promises made during WW I. There were actually three. The Balfour Declaration, the promises of an all encompassing Arab state (as promised through Lawrence and associates), and the Sykes-Picot treaty which was a pure imperialist/colonialist deal between Britain and France and betrayed the promise made to the Arab leadership. The whole affair was a cynical move for which the local populations have paid a heavy price.
There was a promise of Arab self-determination, in keeping with Wilson's Fourteen Points, specifically Point 12. But of course promises are easily broken ...
If the human species has the ability to choose, we could either end up with nuclear winter according to the present progression of events, or we could have an entirely different means of defining sovereignty, see https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/a-possible-path-to-peace
But that assumes that there is a civilization on this planet...
CanaDa and Israal had not come into being yet when my personal reference Bible was printed in 1855.
I speculate the only globe at the TIME God spoke of a Promised Land in the original Abraham Accord was this Globe called Earth. That was 4000 years ago! Imagine!
What I see unfolding in REAL TIME on our Globe TODAY, is not a matter of imagination but recognizing the unfolding REALITY in the Israeli Slaughter of Palestinians to Ethnically cleanse them from Gaza, acting on that 4000 year Promised Land to make it come to be on the ground in OUR Generations.
Netanyahu's Old Testament Jewish Religious Establishment government he formed last January has turned into ACTION, this plank of the 1977 Likud Party Platform, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
An excerpt from Global Research ' How Long Can Israel Defy the World?' published yesterday.
" Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:
“Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”
The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.
Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.
Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:
“We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”
Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.........................................................
In regard to Borders:"National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous pt. of light against a bastion and citadel of the stars...!"-- Carl Sagan Cosmos
Assuming that 70% of all Americans eligible to vote actually vote in 2024 ~ which would be an all-time record [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections for details] ~ that means that only 26.6% of American voters want Trump to be the next POTUS, 25.2% want Biden, and 18.2% want neither or somebody else.
With Biden going to Valley Forge and Trump going to Iowa to mark the 3rd anniversary of January 6, i look forward to Your perspective on that day, Bill.
Don't forget that a major concern of the British and French in controlling the middle east was oil.
Yes, it was oil, and if you really think about driving forces, you have to concede that Western capitalism was the main driver of the wars, the breakup of old countries and the fracturing of the middle east. Western capital used what some have called "primative accumulation" as their primary method of extracting natural resources from other people's territories. Translated that means "steal by force". I predict that things will continue to deteriorate in the world until large numbers of people in the West denounce primative accumulation and the wars that enable it, and demand a turn away from war as the principle means of international dispute resolution.
I predict that borders will change as much in the future as they have in the past, that is quite a lot. There are few things in history as ephemeral as national borders, as I discussed last year: https://believeandobey.net/the-myth-of-sacrosanct-national-borders/
And Israel has never declared official borders. Also it has since 1948 been in an official "state of emergency" Can there be any better evidence that expansion was/is planned?
I was a geography major so you have lit me off!
I'll go a little further back with my 1895 Rand McNally World Atlas. One year later, 1896, Theodore Herzl attempted to buy all of Palestine from the Ottoman Sultan, who refused saying he could not betray his people. Take a look at this map (link follows) of 1895 Palestine noting that the overall map is labeled, curiously, "Turkey in Asia", not the Ottoman Empire in Asia.
https://imgur.com/nPrnv0F
Then there is a closeup of Palestine (link below). Note that not just the city but the entire region is labeled "Jerusalem" and to the north of it (not shown) everything right up through what is now Lebanon is labeled in the atlas "Beirut". You can see on the map north of the city of Jerusalem an area called Judea, in keeping with the Zionist labels of "Samaria and Judea" taken from ancient times.
Almost all place names are in Arabic, most of which Zionism has erased and replaced with either ancient names or new names for settlements that are of course not on this map. That Zionism wants to erase the natives as well is evident in Gaza at the moment, but has been a work in progress all along in the West Bank.
https://imgur.com/ugNgfFX
Israeli PM Ariel Sharon saw that Gaza was too heavily populated for a few tiny Israeli settlements to make progress so he withdrew them, leaving Gaza as a seemingly impossible nut to crack. Now we see the the nut being cracked and from the comments of Israeli government officials including Netanyahu this is causing a great deal of excitement for Israelis.
Thanks for the maps, Clif. Very interesting.
The U.S. was very instrumental in the creation and establishment of the nation of Israel after World War II. It provided ~ and still provides ~ a forward base and basis for military and intelligence operations in the oil-richest region of the Planet; something the US had been wanting to do since at least the end of World War I.
And one thing is certain about the 2115 globe: the United States will not be on it. In fact, there is a very real probability that the United States will not be on a globe made in 2028.
Jeff: If the U.S. isn't on the globe in 2028, what will replace it? What's your guess?
i have absolutely no idea, Bill.
At this stage of the game, i do not think that the United States will survive to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, 912 days from today. And if it does, i think the American Peoples will be in no condition or mood to celebrate anything.
Those who would dismiss as implausible and impossible the demise of the United States in less than three years are invited to consider the year 1988, and how things were going back then at the Berlin Wall, around the Warsaw Bloc, and in the USSR itself. And then remember how things had changed there three years later, starting with the fall of that Wall in 1989 and ultimately, the disintegration of the USSR and the demise of European Communism by the end of 1991.
And those who would denounce this prediction as either irreverent, irrelevant, absurd, conspiratorial, and/or unpatriotic ~ if not traitorous, treasonous, and seditious [there seems to be quite a lot of that going around these days] ~ are invited to confront the simple, obvious [albeit painful] reality that the United States of America is today, has been for a long, long time, and shows no indication of stopping being:
l. a Bankrupt Debtor State
2. an Imperialist Warfare State
3. a Redistributionist Welfare State
4. a Secrecy/Surveillance/Security/proto-Police State
5. an Autocratic/Oligarchic/Plutocratic/Patriarchal Deep State
6. a Failing or at best Flailing Nation State
7. an Overshoot State
And, perhaps most importantly,
8. a People and Nation no longer merely "divided," but fractured~ even to the point of disintegration~ in ways not seen in more than 164 years, since the eve of what may end up being merely the FIRST American Civil War.
My guess is that the U.S. will continue to muddle through, i.e. its ongoing decline will take decades, not just a few years.
But history shows that you never know for sure -- events can accelerate rapidly.
Very rapidly. Again, recall what happened in and to Communist Europe and the USSR from 1988 to 1991.
How about this for 2028, due to an unexpected uprising.
http://tinyurl.com/msdwrj2e (it's safe, I created the link)
The Brits did a little switcheroo during WWI. First they promised Palestine to the Arabs to get their help defeating the Turks. Then they promised Palestine to the Jews to get their help convincing Wilson to get the US into the war. Then after the war they kept Palestine for themselves. High level diplomacy, that.
Perfidious Albion :-)
I have a slightly different perspective on the conflicting promises made during WW I. There were actually three. The Balfour Declaration, the promises of an all encompassing Arab state (as promised through Lawrence and associates), and the Sykes-Picot treaty which was a pure imperialist/colonialist deal between Britain and France and betrayed the promise made to the Arab leadership. The whole affair was a cynical move for which the local populations have paid a heavy price.
Yes, I forgot about T.E. Lawrence.
There was a promise of Arab self-determination, in keeping with Wilson's Fourteen Points, specifically Point 12. But of course promises are easily broken ...
Your article more than makes the point it is time to come home America.
Good work.
If the human species has the ability to choose, we could either end up with nuclear winter according to the present progression of events, or we could have an entirely different means of defining sovereignty, see https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/a-possible-path-to-peace
But that assumes that there is a civilization on this planet...
CanaDa and Israal had not come into being yet when my personal reference Bible was printed in 1855.
I speculate the only globe at the TIME God spoke of a Promised Land in the original Abraham Accord was this Globe called Earth. That was 4000 years ago! Imagine!
What I see unfolding in REAL TIME on our Globe TODAY, is not a matter of imagination but recognizing the unfolding REALITY in the Israeli Slaughter of Palestinians to Ethnically cleanse them from Gaza, acting on that 4000 year Promised Land to make it come to be on the ground in OUR Generations.
Netanyahu's Old Testament Jewish Religious Establishment government he formed last January has turned into ACTION, this plank of the 1977 Likud Party Platform, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
An excerpt from Global Research ' How Long Can Israel Defy the World?' published yesterday.
" Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:
“Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”
The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.
Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.
Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:
“We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”
Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.........................................................
https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-long-israel-defy-world/5845110
In regard to Borders:"National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous pt. of light against a bastion and citadel of the stars...!"-- Carl Sagan Cosmos
FYI: I ran across this article about the true cost of wars: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2023-12-19/opinion-largest-fiscal-cost-war-veterans-benefits-military-troops-lives
According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-vs-trump-would-be-close-rematch-with-rfk-jr-threat-biden-reutersipsos-poll-2023-12-12/], Trump holds a marginal 2-point lead in a head-to-head matchup over Biden, 38% to 36%, with 26% of respondents saying they were unsure or might vote for someone else.
Assuming that 70% of all Americans eligible to vote actually vote in 2024 ~ which would be an all-time record [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections for details] ~ that means that only 26.6% of American voters want Trump to be the next POTUS, 25.2% want Biden, and 18.2% want neither or somebody else.
Which is another argument in favor of making “None Of These Candidates” ~ NOTC ~ a mandatory choice on every ballot for the Presidential [and all other Federal] election in 2024. See https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/reforming-americas-elections-the-notc-way for details.
With Biden going to Valley Forge and Trump going to Iowa to mark the 3rd anniversary of January 6, i look forward to Your perspective on that day, Bill.
Educational perspective, thanks